The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

Bookishness, highest literacy, every technique of cultural propaganda and training not only can accompany bestiality and oppression and despotism but at certain points foster it.

The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room. Thus there may be a covert, betraying link between the cultivation of aesthetic response and the potential of personal inhumanity.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.